Death of the White Knight
by littlegeekpenguin
Summary: That the hero can be worse than the villain never makes it into the story books." Nameless woman reflects on the consequences of being rescued by a mask. No pairings.


That the hero can be worse than the villain never makes it into the story books. No Prince Charming ever grunts in morbid delight as the dragon's blood spurts from its shattered skull to spray on his face; no White Knight has hurmed with detached fascination while breaking the evil wizards fingers, counting them off one by one by one. The atrocities of the just are hardly fairy tale material. Ever since that night she had felt a small, irrational rage towards those nameless, biased creators of childhood myth. She may not have wasted so many bed time prayers wishing for a triumphant hero of her very, very own if she had known the whole story. Ever since the back of the teens skull had shattered against the brick of the alley wall, the sickening squish of gray matter meeting graffiti contrasting sharply with the fading echo of the injured, dying, dead boy's screams, she had regretted every romance novel she had ever envied, every cliché chick flick plot she had ever secretly longed to live. A better part of a decade later, she still held a grudge against those wretched generators of school girl fantasy. Reality was all the more bitter a pill when there were such dreams to measure it against.

She wondered at times if it would have better for the villain to have triumphed. To have shattered innocence, but maintained illusions. Instead she lost both in one swift blow. She lived in New York. Always had and, as much as she loathed it, probably always would. Bad things happened to people in New York. Moral, immoral, or amoral, to live in the city was to tempt disastrous fate no matter what your creed. If she had only been raped at least she would still have her White Knight's and Prince Charming's and Heroes. But she wasn't and she didn't. She had been saved by the only kind of hero able to thrive in the wretched world they lived in. Rescued by a mask. Would she be anything like her willfully naïve, ignorant coworkers and patients if only her screams had remained unheard? What would she have become, if only the man with the shifting face and foul stench hadn't been passing by? But such thoughts were without merit or consequence. Like chasing shadows through the fog. Like the brain matter of a teenage boy splattered against an alley wall. Meaningless.

Sweet sixteen was a terrible age to have your foolish dreams turned into waking nightmares. Or, if you were a fan of irony, it was the perfect time for it. Sixteen: the time of summer romance and wild fantasy. When hope is high, life worth living, and the dark, mysterious stranger with a tragic past and heart of gold from every movie and made for TV special is out there, somewhere, waiting just for you. But that is fantasy and this is reality, and reality doesn't care what age you are or how much you really, truly do believe in love and redemption and trashy romance novels with masked rouges in torn shirts on the cover.

In reality when the young, pretty but not beautiful, girl walks down a dark alley at night it isn't a gang of evil men that grab her and force her to the ground, and it isn't a chiseled from marble boy scout in too tight spandex pants that rescues her. It's a teenage junkie, even younger than her, whose boney hands wrap around her wrists, the only evil in him the vivid unreality the poisons in his blood choose to show him as he grinds against her. And in the real world the attack doesn't last forever in morbid slow motion. In reality the assault is over before it really begins, the crazed eyes of the strung out child rolling back into his soon to be shattered skull as the wretched crack of breaking bone fills the night and the real horror starts. In reality death isn't like in the movies. The fallen have no last words and the witness doesn't cradle the broken form as he dies. There are only snaps and screams and hurms and harsh choked back almost sobs that she doesn't recognize as her own until she dreams about it again and again and again.

She knows that in all the old black and white movies, like Frankenstein and Wolfman and The Phantom of the Opera that she had used to sigh over the poor, misunderstood creature that only needed love in, they had used chocolate syrup for blood. A random bit of trivia she had picked up from her father or uncle or cousin too long ago to really remember when. At age sixteen she had learned blood was nothing like chocolate syrup. It's hot and wet and slippery and gets everywhere, spraying much further and in far more directions that she thought possible from a single body. Then, only seconds after hitting the air, it starts to dry and becomes tight and sticky on the skin, ruined nice new sweaters that her boyfriend had bought her, tasted like pennies wrapped in aluminum foil, and, though it never had since, smelled like garbage soaked in Nostalgia.

And then it's over. In fantasy the conquering hero sweeps up the damsel fair, whisking her away from this terrible world. She had dedicated entire afternoons, dazed off during untold numbers of classes, dreaming about just such an event. What he would look like, what she would say. How he would know in an instant she was different from all the countless others he had rescued. The wonder, the romance. The lie. In the real world the murderer only straightened his trench coat, retrieved the hat that had been knocked from his skull during the boys death throws, and finished exiting the alley, continuing the path he had intended to take all along as though nothing had happened at all. The terrified and blood soaked girl is left to stumble her own way home and gulls and rats gather to pick at the assailants corpse. She knew from the newspapers that by the time the police had found the body there had only been enough left to ID him through dental records. Even now she keeps the newspaper clipping concerning a decomposed teen found murdered in an alley in the back of a dresser drawer. Only she knows what he did and what was done to him. She highly doubts his killer recalls at all.

She told her parents she was almost raped, explained to them how some passerby had saved her. She never mentioned the masked man, never said how her assaulter was butchered before her eyes. Her parents still believed in Heroes and Knights and even as a self-absorbed teen she couldn't find it in herself to take that from them. What benefit would it bring? What was done was done and could never be undone, and the world was just the same as it had been the day, week, year before. The only thing that had changed at all as a result of it was her.

Her parents had sent her to therapists. Slews of them, in fact. They couldn't understand why their bright, chipper cheerleader had become a stoic recluse. When her second shrink showed her the Rorschach cards she laughed until she cried or cried until she laughed, she could never decide which it had been. When the Doctor asked why she told him it didn't matter, but she couldn't properly respond to the test. She'd heard the cards don't work if you've seen them before.

Five more shrinks down the line and she was off to college and her parents finally gave up. Whatever had gone wrong was there to stay. She could never tell them it wasn't that something had gone wrong. Something had gone right in her. The destruction of delusions and false beliefs was something to strive for, or at least so said doctors 2, 3, and 6. And she certainly had been freed of a near countless number of such illusions. She could never decide whether to curse him or thank him for that, and she was fairly certain it wasn't a choice she would ever need to make. Even if she shattered statistical probability and met up with her masked rescuer once more, conversation would not be her primary objective: getting far, far away before any more outfits could be ruined by human splatter would be occupying much more of her mind at such a time.

She'd graduated with a degree in forensic nursing. When she believed in Knights and Princes she had wanted to be an actress, or a dancer, or a singer, but afterwards she realized the world had enough lies in it. The truth was there was no good and evil in the world, only people, and typically, people fell into one of two categories: those that broke and those that fixed. She would be damned if she would willing continue life as a breaker. The world was broken enough, millions of people in this city alone living only for themselves, wandering through their dirty, sad lives doing whatever it took to whoever it took to get what they felt they deserved. And she had been like them until she found out blood wasn't like chocolate and being rescued can be worse than being damned.

Now she fixed what she could. They came to her: beaten, bruised, raped, mutilated, thousands upon thousands every year who could have been her if fate or random chance, forces equally uncaring and remote, hadn't brought him to that alley on that night at that time. When she sees their broken eyes and hears their pitiful sobs she is nearly sure she was the lucky one. Then she hears them cry out how they had prayed for a hero and none had come and why, why hadn't God heard their cries? And she does not tell them that there are no heroes, only villains with different values, and God had heard them but didn't care. Emotions belong to the realm of humanity, and humans are imperfect. God is perfect, so He cannot feel and he cannot care. By their definition, Heroes are also perfect, therefore they must be Gods. And Gods have never cared about them, about her, about anything. The only ones that care for humans are humans and those that wear masks to save humanity from itself are the most imperfect ones of all. And then she feels empty and alone and cursed that because of him she knows that and no one else does. Then she thinks they are the lucky ones, to still be able to believe that somewhere there is a God and that He is cruel, and thus has the capacity to be kind.

They would never meet again. This was not a movie or fairy tale where the binding strings of fate would pull them together once more. She would never find out if, assuming there was no immediate escape from him, she would curse him or thank him. She knew this, like she knew the sun would rise and the tides would turn. But sometimes, late at night when she woke alone in her run down apartment, covered in a cold sweat with the smell of rotting Nostalgia still in her nose and the taste of blood and brains on her tongue, she wondered if she knew it with the same certainty she had once known there were Heroes and that Good was good and Evil was evil.

She was certain they would never meet again. But somewhere in the darkest corner of her mind, she knows that certainty and absolutes have no place in reality. In the real world the remotest, vilest ending often came true and the sure thing was never realized. And, late at night drenched in her own sweat, when she admitted this fact to herself, only then she was afraid.


End file.
